Will Tysons Accommodate Vienna?

Tuesday morning, Mayor Jane Seeman was already drafting a letter to the county Board of Supervisors asking how the traffic impact of proposed developments at Tysons Corner will be addressed.

"The guiding planning principles do not address transportation right now," she said.

At Monday night's work session, the Town Council had heard from Vienna's representative on the Tysons Task Force, Ed Chase, who also sits on the town's Planning Commission. The Task Force, said Seeman, is developing guidelines for developments around the proposed Tysons Metro station but has not been charged with considering larger transportation issues.

"We see another MetroWest, where transportation planning stops right at the edge of the planning district," said Seeman.

In addition to increased traffic in Vienna, she said, moving traffic through Tysons is also a concern. She said the town wants to know whether these questions are addressed in the TransAction 2030 long-range transportation plan that the county recently endorsed.

Chase said the Task force will be addressing the transportation impact on Vienna and McLean, but not until the guidelines for development have been further refined. For now, he said, they are only considering transportation within Tysons Corner.

The only language regarding transportation in the Task Force's "guiding planning principles" thus far sets a goal to "reduce the time cost and inconvenience of accessing Tysons Corner and its services" via a "functional and accessible system of pedestrian walkways, trails and bike routes, and a grid of streets, transit connections and Metrorail."

The Task Force's final report is to be submitted to the Board of Supervisors in March of 2008.

Seeman said the council also decided to go forward with the adoption of this year's town budget and then discussed naming the small park planned for the corner of Nutley and Knoll streets.

They are considering naming the park after Sarah Walker Mercer, an active community member who lived on the property adjacent to the park, now occupied by her son, she said.

The mayor also reported that the town is prepared to begin preliminary work on the Beulah Road reconstruction project, the plan for which was recently revised in order to relocate the power lines while saving as many trees as possible from being removed in the process.